Such arrangements may seem to offer the best of all worlds. The bank
and the charity are happy. The new bank client pays nothing and gains credit,
kudos and, a nice warm feeling inside. Advertising for the Care Card stresses
that the more you spend on yourself, the more is paid to the charity. No
longer need consumption be associated with environmental guilt: just the
reverse, in fact.

In the nick of time, such schemes provide an answer for a society beginning
to find luxurious lifestyles difficult to reconcile with responsibility
for the environment. ‘Whenever you pay, show you care,’ enthuses Midland’s
literature, alluding to the effects of ostentatious buckshee generosity
on your peers. ‘With the Care Card, there isn’t a shadow of doubt as to
the good that you will be doing,’ says the bank, encouraging us to think
no further about what might be destroying the world.

Real conservationists are more interested in macroeconomics. They note
that, in 1989 for example, the Third World provided $133 billion for debt
payments to the First World. Similar huge transfers of wealth take place
continuously, bleeding developing countries’ environments and, according
to UNICEF, causing the death of half a million children each year. Among
the greatest recipients and greatest perpetuators of this situation are
high-street banks, some of which have now become so keen to declare their
role in saving the world.

As major players in world finance, banks have considerable influence
over the debt strategy that they, the World Bank, the IMF and northern governments
are to follow. With money still rolling in, they have shown a consistent
lack of interest in finding a solution to the crisis. Their refusal to co-operate
fully with the 1986 Baker Plan was particularly damaging. It is the banks
of the North that have insisted on debtors adopting IMF austerity measures
before negotiating with them, and then promoted such bank-benefiting options
as privatisation and debt-equity swops. They have even managed to force
the governments of largely destitute populations to accept responsibility
for loans originally made to the private sector.

Now it is clear that the loans can never be repaid, the high-street
banks have, with some publicity, adjusted their figures to take account
of the expected loss. They have received tax relief as a result, but the
debtors still have to repay the debts.

Even the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) agrees that the debt is ‘one
of the root causes’ of rainforest destruction, and justifies its deal with
NatWest on the grounds that it offers an opportunity to influence the bank
to look seriously at debt forgiveness. Living Earth puts forward a similar
argument for its involvement with Midland. The WWF promises to enter partnerships
only with companies that manage their environmental affairs responsibly,
and then to work with them ‘to ensure that factual, accurate and relevant
information is given to the consumer, so that an informed choice can be
made about the company and its products or services’.

The reality is different. NatWest’s colourfully decorated promotional
booklet uses the WWF’s name to good effect. It makes great play of the good
the bank is doing for the tropical environment, but no mention of the high-street
banks’ underlying role in the ecological crisis. The WWF and Living Earth
are also reticent in their own literature. Far from responding to the WWF’s
influence, NatWest seems to be trying to influence the world’s most prestigious
non-governmental conservation organisation. Worse, the WWF and Living Earth
are compromising other efforts to tackle the debt.

Environmental groups certainly need money, but giving them money is
no alternative to dealing with the problems that created the groups in the
first place. Deforestation cannot be solved with money. For the best of
reasons the rainforests are not for sale, and transferring their ownership
would not necessarily protect them anyway. The rainforests and their priceless
contents can be saved only if, among other things, land reform takes place
in the Third World, the debts are resolved, and common people in developing
countries are given security over their own livelihoods.

Criticism of the banks comes from sources including Friends of the Earth,
the Gaia Foundation, Christian Aid, the Ecologist magazine, Third World
First and the Green Party. Onlookers are horrified that the WWf and Living
Earth have let their influence be short-circuited by selling their names
to the very vested interests who can make most destructive use of them.

Friends of the Earth has particular cause to complain. FoE’s own debt
campaign is designed to put pressure on the four main banks (Lloyds, Nat
West, Barclays and Midland) through existing account holders. Like the WWF
and Living Earth schemes, it costs the customer nothing. In contrast, no
one gains anything either – a sign that the campaign is on the right track.
Cooperating bank customers sign a pledge, each agreeing to move their account
whenever bidden by FoE unless the present bank cooperates with various measures
to resolve the debts. The message to the banks is emphasised by these customers
rubber stamping their cheques with an appropriate slogan. Unfortunately,
Living Earth and the WWF have obstructed the campaign by providing two of
the banks with what appear to be the best of environmental credentials.

What has gone wrong at Living Earth and the WWF? In his book Lords of
Poverty, Graham Hancock details how the zeal of many UN workers has been
redirected into the career race. Are jet-set environmental organisations
going the same way?

In fact, it is society that has failed the conservationists, not the
other way round. Conservation organisations can do little more than investigate
the holocaust and then tell us, individually and collectively, how to react
to it. If we are not going to take any notice of them, for example by ignoring
the WWF’s pleas to reject unsustainably extracted tropical hardwood, then
the future is already decided. Most of us willingly support environmental
groups with words and loose change. Then we buy tropical hardwood conservatories,
fail to investigate the substance behind our politics, and shy away from
using our influence through laziness or because it would make us feel uncomfortable.

What should be inescapable personal responsibilities are donated to
environmental organisations along with cash. Reacting to this impossible
burden, it is not surprising if some of those in the front line of conservation
also take the easy but ineffectual option.

Tim Rickman is a member of the Green Party, and a former member of Friends
of the Earth.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it comes from one of the current
breed of environmentally angled TV advertisements. While viewers see hippies
touring pine forests in a psychedelic open top, a voice-over by radio personality
John Peel intersperses appropriate music to announce that every time the
paper giant cuts down a tree, it plants another one.

So far, so good. We all like people planting trees, even if they cut
them down as well. The crunch comes towards the end, however, where it is
confidently declared that ‘as saplings grow, they use up three times as
much carbon dioxide as mature trees, which helps counter the greenhouse
±ð´Ú´Ú±ð³¦³Ù’.

If you think this means that young trees are better at reducing the
greenhouse effect than old ones (as you are obviously intended to) then
you are wrong. Planting a tree to replace each one you cut down is certainly
better than not doing so, but is equally certainly not as good as (let alone
better than) leaving the original one in place. This is because the critical
factor is not the speed of carbon dioxide uptake but the amount of carbon
stored within a forest.

Perhaps this should be self-evident, but it is confirmed by a study
recently published by Mark Harmon and his colleagues in Science (vol 247,
p 699). They simulated carbon storage in old and young forests and found
that replacing old trees with new would result in a net release of carbon
dioxide to the atmosphere.

A mature tree may contain tonnes of carbon. But when the tree is cut
down, the carbon starts to return to the atmosphere in the form of carbon
dioxide. The use to which the timber is put largely determines the speed
of this process.

Typically, a large proportion of harvested timber is converted into
short-lived products, such as paper, bark mulch and fuel. After use, all
these products return their carbon to the atmosphere. Waste or defective
wood is often never removed from the forest, and rots there, achieving the
same result. (Of course, for wood turned into furniture and other long-lived
products, the carbon will remain in store until the item comes to the end
of its life and is destroyed.) Harmon’s team calculates that within five
years, by which time any replacement seedlings will still be tiny, perhaps
half of the carbon from the original forest will be back in the atmosphere
and busy contributing to the greenhouse effect.

Tissue is a particularly short-lived product, so its manufacture is
one of the least effective ways of keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.
We use tissue almost as soon as we buy it, and then we try to get rid of
it as quickly as possible, either by incineration or by encouraging it to
rot in sewage sludge. We do the same with recycled tissue, of course, but
at least in doing so we extend the life of an existing carbon-based material,
which would otherwise already be discarded and on its way back to the atmosphere.

Scott is not the first to try this one on an unsophisticated public.
The American Forest Council, representing the country’s timber industry,
recently produced a booklet which skirted around the outright untruth in
a similar way to Scott’s advert. Describing mature trees as ‘decadent’ (a
term more usually reserved for attacks on the particular system of resource
distribution so favoured by industry), the booklet uses information on growth
rates and carbon uptake to distract readers from the simple fact that big
trees are big, and small ones are small.

In the US, logging of natural forest on public land is frequently subsidised
with public money, and would otherwise often be uneconomic. The subsidies
are justified by various means, including rather dubious assertions of benefits
to wildlife and provision of water (water, along with soil, is quickly lost
from cleared land).

In Britain, the Timber Trade Federation, major adversaries of the Friends
of the Earth UK in its campaign to save rainforests, now has an equivalent
leaflet. Attempting to justify the current damage that trade in tropical
hardwood is doing to the world’s primary rainforests, the TTF assures readers
that younger trees absorb carbon dioxide best, and that ‘older trees do
not contribute to this process’.

It is easy to see why Scott should also want to take full advantage
of the carbon dioxide scam. Last year, its ambitions to clear rain forest
and replant with pulp trees enraged environmentalists. The Friends of the
Earth very nearly introduced a boycott of its products in Britain, and although
Scott agreed to drop its plans, its image suffered.

An obvious question is how Scott’s advert ever made it to our screens.
The IBA’s much-vaunted new rules on environmental advertising are comprehensive
and stiff to satisfy. One requirement is that advertising messages must
be clearly understandable and not misleading to those without specialist
or scientific knowledge. In other words, viewers shouldn’t need a PhD to
be able to deduce that what they are being told is not relevant, or that
it does not mean what it seems to mean, or (as in this case) both.

The IBA rules also expect, quite reasonably, that if a company wishes
to advertise its product on the grounds of some specific advantage, then
there must be some other product which is or was worse. In this case, the
obvious alternative is recycled paper, which is better. One might even argue
that other first-use paper is no worse, on the grounds that the softwoods
used to make tissues normally are replanted.

So how did Scott manage to get around the rules? And how did the soundtrack
of the advert come to form part of a feature on Radio 1 intended to demonstrate
how all is pure and sincere in environmental advertising? In part, the answer
seems to lie in the IBA’s lack of experience in dealing with matters of
atmospheric chemistry.

Andy Wilson, IBA advertising control officer, says that the authority
was presented with evidence that Scott’s acreage ‘not only absorbs the carbon
dioxide which its own processes produced, but absorbs a significant amount
more’. It was even suggested that, in the US alone, this extra amount was
equal to that produced in generating power from coal for a fair-sized city.

Such an amazing achievement would require, for each year of the company’s
existence, the establishment of a vast area of new plantations on previously
unforested land. It may not be necessary to go looking for these, however.
In a later letter to a viewer who asked for confirmation, Scott more modestly
said it only ‘hopes to minimise contributions’ to rising levels of carbon
dioxide.

The IBA is now investigating Scott’s claims and considering whether
to continue allowing the advert to be broadcast. Mean while, as Scott’s
hippies take at least a temporary rest from our screens, perhaps we should
be watching the remaining commercials more carefully – just in case we aren’t
seeing the carbon for the trees.

Tim Rickman is a member of the Green Party who is concerned about environmental
degradation and rainforest destruction.